Fantasy pseudo-anachronism part two: Aetheric boogaloo

Following up on yesterday's post, here are some thoughts on pseudo-anachronisms that didn't end up in the main article.

Additions

First, there were a couple of pseudo-anachronisms I had intended to mention. Nice beds with mattresses and pillows are major investments, certainly not something every person owned, even when they're just pallets made from straw sitting on the floor. (If you think a bed is expensive today, consider that it would have been a large fraction of a house's value in many pre-industrial places and times.) Also, inns for travelers to stay in. Inns were only common on major roads, pilgrim and trade routes, and in cities and market towns. The chances of a random village having an inn would be close to zero, even a village in the middle of civilisation. And even in a reputable inn, it would be a luxury to get your own private bed that you didn't have to share with a couple of strangers or traveling companions, let alone getting your own private room!

To have nice beds and pervasive inns in our fantasy world, we need a reason to have a culture of travel, in particular to non-notable destinations. We also need a cheaper way of making sleep furniture – maybe some ancient artefact has been churning beds out at a rate of fifty per day for thousands of years, or maybe there's a widespread plague of puffball pigeons (all feathers and no flesh), or maybe when a domesticated slime dies it dries up into something superficially like a beanbag chair.

Second, reader Lauren suggested the addition of "well-lit rooms after sunset". It's true! If you've tried to light a room with candles before, you've found that candle light is really very weak. Any kind of fire doesn't, uh, hold a candle to electric lighting. Lauren also pointed out that many modern people are used to the ambient light pollution of a big modern city; complete darkness is very disorienting. It's hard to keep your balance standing up in true darkness, let alone move around, but TTRPG rule penalties are often just a slap on the wrist. As with many things, inconvenient truths get handwaved away unless they provide excitement in the game.

I think well-lit rooms at night is particularly common in visual arts and film, where the viewer's ability to see most of the shot is pretty much the most important thing.

So 'convenient modern lighting' is a fantasy pseudo-anachronism. It's one that any number of fantastic technologies could solve (glowing magical crystals, cold-burning lanterns, the ubiquitous luminescent dungeon wall fungi, minor spells and charms, enchanted or holy candles, unusually bright domesticated fireflies, rushlights from the will'o'wisp marshes, whatever). Think carefully before making it a solved problem for the common person, though: clean, cheap, portable, bright light like we have at hand nowadays is a powerful technology. It takes terror away from the night and eclipses and deep dark caves. It drastically changes warfare. It changes sleep patterns and therefore labour patterns and local economies. It removes a constraint that can serve to drive gameplay.

Missing technologies

Rarely, fantasy takes things away from the generic 1300s-to-1600s technological milieu, rather than adding pseudo-anachronistic technologies.

For example, central heating, chewing gum, concrete, contraception, ice skates, and lighthouses were all invented thousands of years ago. I've seen a setting where characters in a snowy town had no way to cross a lake which froze every winter. And there's no excuse for not having a lighthouse guarding the dangerous shoals near a major wealthy port city. Some of the others aren't likely to come up, depending on what kind of ground the fantasy is going to cover.

Complex financial instruments, too, are fairly old (the word "credit" appeared in English in the 1520s, and at the time English-speaking states were economically a bit of a backwater; I don't know much about the history of banking but I would be surprised if continental Europe didn't have entrenched banking and other institutions in centuries prior, and the Islamic world and the East earlier still). I think sometimes TTRPG settings leave out promissory notes, banknotes, loans and interest payments, insurance policies, and so on due to a false perception that these are modern innovations.

The elephant in the room in this regard, of course, is gunpowder. Cannons were widespread in the West from the start of our supposed fantasy technological band, and early man-portable guns were in use well before plate armour reached its apogee. In China and its neighbours, gunpowder had been used for at least five hundred years prior to the period, initially as an incendiary weapon.

There are good reasons for not wanting gunpowder in a setting, reasons which have been discussed to bits. Everyone reaches a different answer to the question (some, possibly, because of misapprehensions imported from modernity about how powerful, fast, cheap, light, or accurate an early gun could be; I personally don't think preindustrial firearms being 'too good' is an adequate reason to exclude them from a fantasy setting). Gygax was notoriously against gunpowder in D&D, going so far as to say that the laws of physics in his fantasy universe were such that chemical reactions were weaker. I don't think that's a great solution, because it's both underspecific and implies weird knock-on effects.

If we want a world where 'black powder' gunpowder was just never invented, is that historically plausible? On the face of it, no. It's three ingredients, of which sulphur is very common in nature, charcoal is an incredibly important part of metalworking technology, and saltpeter can be refined from fairly common mineral deposits or bat guano. Additionally, 'classic' fantasy has early chemist analogues trying things out (I think modern fantasy has sadly transformed the word 'alchemist' to mostly mean 'magic potion-maker', rather than 'a philosopher obsessed with the idea of attaining physical, mental, and spiritual perfection via a mixture of study, experiment, religious ceremony, allegory, chemical means, mystery cults, etc').

But what that argument overlooks is that having access to magic might impede the development of gunpowder weaponry. Early experiments with explosive or incendiary mixtures probably wouldn't have been (a) taken as far, (b) seen as something remarkable, or (c) suggestive of exciting military applications, if two streets over from the workshop was an academy of war wizards suiting up for another day of hurling explosive fireballs, turning city walls to mud, and setting things on fire with their minds. Even assuming magical arts were at the time in their infancy rather than developed, they would have a competitive advantage due to their comparative versatility. So, inverted pseudo-anachronism: Solved.

(Conversely, if you wanted to take it in the other direction, and have gunpowder keep up with or surpass violent forms of magic, a world with fantasy materials might have better ingredients for a propellant. Materials that were more common, cheaper to make, easier to discover, safer to store, produced a more powerful reaction, burned smokelessly, negated the sound of their own explosion, or whatever.)

Pseudo-anachronistic systemic technologies

There were a few technologies I left out of the first article because they are more processes than inventions.

1. Classic fantasy has machines but no factory mass production.

There's an artificer, wright, engineer, or (sigh) 'alchemist' who makes devices. There's steam power, clockwork, waterwheel power, or complex systems of gravity power or compressed springs powering elaborate mechanical traps. There might be non-magical 'automata'. Sometimes it's almost a genre shift into steampunk or clockpunk. Sometimes it's subtle: the dungeon gates open and close with the right series of lever pulls and Detect Magic doesn't turn anything up, but further details about the mechanism aren't forthcoming.

Luckily for our settings, there are major societal factors necessary for factory mass production to flourish. It's not enough to have the idea and the metalworking skill. Labour must be at least moderately expensive (compared to thoroughly pre-industrial eras, not compared to today). There has to be the wealth and systemic control to acquire, move, and stockpile large quantities of raw resources. There must be pretty good ways to transport input and output goods. There must be at least a little hint of standardisation in the cultural zeitgeist. Things must be sufficiently peaceful and stable locally that the wealthy feel confident investing huge amounts of capital starting up a new kind of business whose nature is that it must be continually fed or suffer major costs. And it probably helps if there are enormous costly wars going on in the background to drive both demand and development.

Two thousand years ago, the Ancient Greeks had clockwork, a simple steam engine, and Heron of Alexandria described mechanical automata and a vending machine (a coin-operated mechanical holy water dispenser). But the conditions weren't right for industrialisation: It wasn't Steam Engine Time.

Still, if you want to play it safe, consider adding a rare, non-scaleable magical element to the setting's contraptions (some bit of fantasy metallurgy or alternative physics power source or unique irreplaceable artefact).

2. Classic fantasy implies advanced food production.

My impression of the typical TTRPG fantasy milieu is that even small settlements have great numbers of skilled workers outside the fields of food and textile production. Compare that to almost all preindustrial places and times, where the farmer-to-specialist ratio is somewhere between 90:10 and 99:1. The implication is advanced food production technology, but this is seldom directly shown.

There's two avenues to resolve this. You could say there's an enormous spiderweb of little farming hamlets and fishing villages, mostly ignored by the setting focus, diligently toiling to feed and clothe themselves and send their crop of food or textiles to market to pay their taxes (or send them directly to the tax collector, in less moneyed societies).

Or you could add the milieu-appropriate equivalent of spray pesticides, antibiotics, massive greenhouses, John Deere tractors, chemical fertilisers, advanced irrigation, and GMO crops. Let's say that stirge blood repels all insect larvae, and breaks down into a decent fantasy fertiliser. Water mages harness tiny elementals for drainage and irrigation. Weather witches work the weather. Migrating flocks of giant eagles regularly fix the soil nitrogen. The obsidian bullock pulls a plough slowly, but forever, night and day, without needing to eat or drink. A growthstone is costly, but all plants within two leagues of one grow at twice the rate, so you just have to keep up with the weeding. The peaceful living dead keep birds away for a while before degrading and nourishing the loam. And to cover gaps, the magic temple is happy to dispense endless miracle bread to the sufficiently needy.

3. In classic fantasy, big things don't decay.

Speaking of nourishing the loam... In the real world, everything is subject to entropy. Even stone degrades over time. There are startlingly close to zero stone buildings whose original roofs have stood the test of centuries. Earth settles, tunnels collapse. Most metals corrode. Wood rots or gets eaten, even in the dry. And – you know where I'm going with this – dungeons aren't usually well known for being dry. Ancient megastructures like lost castles and sprawling dungeons are sort of a fantasy anachronism, in that they are basically supernaturally well-preserved archaeological sites. In our world, furnishings and materials in them would be rotten within years, everything mechanical would have completely seized up within decades, the entrances (at a minimum) would get thoroughly sealed by a bunch of debris blowing in, and eventually the structure's integrity would fail.

This is of course no fun. Luckily there are plenty of possibilities. Lingering enchantments. Automata or invisible demons or extensions of the Gygaxian 'cleanup crew' which eat dust and grit and drifts of leaves. Magical materials that don't corrode or rot. Something to bear in mind is that most of these anti-entropy fantasy technologies are going to be valuable to people in the world, so by adding verisimilitude to your dungeons and ancient monuments you are also adding stuff that people are going to want to mine/harvest/tame/imitate and put in their own homes.

4. Classic fantasy makes outdated arms and armours contemporaneous with later ones.

Okay, this is mostly just a pet peeve, but it's close enough to the topic for me to justify cramming it in.

Particularly in the case of armour, your generic fantasy setting offers armours from radically different warfare/civilian contexts (almost always getting the armour itself wrong, but that's another story) as if any of them could be reasonable choices. In practice, people going into battle wore the best armour they could afford, perhaps modulated slightly by considerations of comfort. Let's look at mail vs plate, which is the biggest example (apart perhaps from 'leather armour' which is somehow both protective enough to sometimes be chosen over metal and quiet/fast to move around in; yeesh).

If a setting has the technology, expertise, and capital investment to make plate harness, then a fully protective suit of mail (hauberk including coif + aventail + chausses + gloves etc) is strictly worse than a suit of plate armour: the mail is either heavier or much thinner (because of ring overlap!), and more expensive (it takes more labour to make and rivet the large number of rings than to shape the smaller number of plates, and both are kinds of skilled labour!), and less protective (because mail flexes at points other than the joints!), and no less encumbering (assuming the plate armour is properly made, you can't do yoga in it, but that's about the limit of its limits).

The only advantages you could argue for mail are that it's slightly less hot to wear, due to its breathability (except, it tended to be worn over thicker clothing), and that it's easier to don and doff (definitely true: maybe twenty or thirty times faster, and you don't need assistance from a servant or colleague). Did both mail and plate exist at the same time? Sure; transitional armours increasingly covered the body with plate and retained mail at the tricky gaps (goussets, and then just voiders). Should a setting book place 'full plate' next to 'chain mail' and 'leather clothing armour' as options that just have different tradeoffs? No way.

Can we find a good rationale for having mail hauberks in the same setting as sophisticated high-coverage plate armour? Only, I think, at places and times when expertise in making armour plates is tightly controlled and/or slowly leaking out into the wider world. The only good reason to offer both these armours as reasonable options to player characters is if the massive difference in time to don/doff them is actually going to matter in play, and this must be the way the opportunity cost is framed instead of nonsense like 'plate costs more than mail' or 'plate is heavier than mail'.

This all applies to some extent to weaponry, too: fantasy TTRPGs love big lists of weapons from across many centuries, and some of them ought to be modeled as strict improvements of others. And to weapons platforms, like the chariot, which was thoroughly superseded by horseback riding, but still pops up in fantasy from time to time. Also the galley, which has three core assets (incredible maneuverability, naval ram, and capacity for beach landings) and three core drawbacks (high crew requirement, low cargo capacity, and relative fragility), but I've seen settings which included galley-like ships to evoke an Ancient feel while managing to ignore all of those factors.

Arms and armour are the products of a continuous technological competition – hence the term 'arms race' – and classic fantasy almost never includes what you would actually expect: weapons and armour (and tactics, troop formations, earthworks, etc) that are specifically designed for fighting giant enemies, invisible enemies, winged enemies, hordes of extremely small enemies, enemies that can't be cut or pierced, enemies that are slow but kill with a touch, and so on. Instead, at best, real-world weapons are used against them in novel ways. This is one of the few areas where fantasy actually needs to make more stuff up.

Pseudo-anachronistic societal features

Finally, I'm going to briefly go over a few things that aren't technologies. They're arguably pseudo-anachronistic, but are beyond the main scope of what I've been talking about with and frankly would need a whole series of articles to get into, and touch on topics which deserve a deep and sober treatment. For many of them I also think they could have become widespread features of societies earlier in our history, they just didn't happen to do so.

Actually, in an attempt to rein in my impulse to go on typing for hours, I'll switch to bullet points. These tropes show up in 'classic' fantasy quite often:

• General stores and grocery shops. Pretty modern idea.
• Lots of off-the-shelf products rather than things being custom-made, commissioned, or at least assembled on the spot. Historically, if you wanted to buy a knife, you'd likely visit a blade seller (who sells blades bought from a blade maker), and a hilt maker, and possibly even a separate knife maker to join them together if neither of the first two offered that service, and then you would go somewhere else to get a sheath made for it. If you were rich, you would possibly have any or all of those parts made to your preferences, and then might visit yet another craftsperson specialising in decorations (embellishing, engraving, insetting, etc).
• Civil police forces, or town guards who for some reason serve as constables. Not completely unheard of historically, but you're more likely to run into the local aristocrat's enforcers, or a town militia/guard with strictly military responsibilities, or just three people (a reeve, a coroner, and a magistrate) to be the law system for an entire shire, county, or small fief.
  
• Minor professions inexplicably organised into guilds; guilds that lack a religious/charitable structure; guilds operating like labour unions rather than corporations trying to suppress competition; guilds envisioned by people who learned the word from MMOs; guilds for major military technologies that really ought to be state-controlled... I could go on. I usually just shake my head and assume the word 'guild' is a spotty translation from the invented language the characters are speaking, not meant to bear any relation to the real world.
• The (correct, to be clear) modern perception held by almost all individuals and even by most states that war is bad.
• The notion that a war is likely to be for some abstract goal of 'power' or to extend a ruler's 'reach' rather than for territory and loot. In a world where land equals wealth, a successful war is a financial investment with a huge payoff (things like holy wars, wars of succession, etc, notwithstanding).
• People (correctly, to be clear) being viscerally and morally repulsed by what we now call war crimes and torture 'even' against 'the other side'. It's a depressing reflection of how groups of people operate that this is only a modern concept.
• Modern principles of individual liberty and rights, personal equality, and other individual rights. Anyone with basic knowledge of history knows that these were incredibly hard-earned and we are lucky to mostly now live in societies that have them at least in principle. It's not clear whether fantasy imports these because we're so immersed in them or because it's not fun to play without them.
  
• People living without major societal obligations and without a rigid societal, contractual, or familial relationship with the people ruling them. e.g., vassalage. I think fantasy settings tend to just pay lip service here, because it's not fun to have to bend the knee to your 'betters'.
• Conversely, in some settings, absolute tyranny existing unchallenged. Arguably more historically plausible, but even more plausible would be: the lieutenants and rich vassals think the rulers have far too much power + the rulers think they're giving up too much power and are trying to claw it back + there's a backdrop of masses of poor tenants and peasants desperately trying to get their established rights upheld. See e.g. the Magna Carta.
• (Pseudo-)democracies where everyone is franchised.
• Large numbers of empowered women with equal rights and with societal roles overlapping with those of men (or without distinct societal roles). Again, to be clear, a good thing, but rare historically. I have absolutely no expertise here but I usually see an explanation for how the systemic oppression of women came about that goes [average male physical strength advantage + power derives from strength-based violence + societies were more likely to succeed when the powerful set the rules + people tend to support existing rules (or, successful societies encourage supporting existing rules) → men seize and then hold and maintain power almost exclusively]. The good news is that you can excise this from a fantasy world by having magic more powerful than strength, or by reducing biological differences between the sexes, or by having interventionist gods who support equality, etc.
• More generally, no bigotry, slavery, or systemic prejudice. Sometimes this is because everyday common people are space aliens, by which I mean they aren't under-educated, clannish, selfish, fearful, violent, and ignorant of the wider world. Sometimes people are portrayed plausibly but intolerance magically doesn't happen at a wider scale. There are good and obvious reasons not to want bigotry in your setting or to confront it in your games, but (and now this list is just making me sad) pervasive intolerance has historical verisimilitude. Yeesh. How about we say that the fantasy world's populations are massively cosmopolitan, driven by ancient diasporas of hundreds or preferably thousands of peoples; everyone looks different to each other, even very locally, and innumerable culture are constantly blending. Or maybe we resort to magical divine intervention again to fix things.
• Speaking of which, there's the trope of 'everyone's religious beliefs are strictly compatible'. In a classic TTRPG fantasy, the gods definitely exist, everyone agrees on what they're like, everyone mostly agrees on their names, most people worship a single god even though there's a pantheon, and nobody is erroneously worshipping a god who doesn't provably (or provably doesn't) exist. This has always been quite funny to me. Maybe I'll write an article about interesting alternatives.
• Immortality as a desideratum only of evildoers (e.g., liches and sorcerer-kings). Likely imported from major modern religions; I don't think many nonreligious people are keen to grow old and die. The trope is kind of compatible with there provably being a good afterlife, but that's not always the case in a fantasy world, especially when you're not one of the tiny number of people with a divine magic pipeline.
  

There we go. If you think I missed any notable pseudo-anachronism, leave a comment!

Four kinds of fantasy setting peeves

Personally, our peeves when it comes to the tropes in fantasy books, TTRPGs, and shows can be reduced to four categories. Our favourite works are those that are careful about all of them.

Category 1. Yes We Are Super Pedantic.

Armour made of interlinked rings has a name. It's 'mail', not 'chain mail'. If you want to be period-appropriate, you might say 'maille' or 'mayle'. Armour made of thin lames of metal has a name. It's 'lamellar armour', not 'splinted mail'. The preposterous place we're in with pervasive fantasy armours that are mis-named or just plain stupid can be traced back to Victorian antiquaries and burgeoning medievalists like Grose and Meyrick. They chose to use 'mail' to mean 'metal armour', contra its historical meaning, and invented a bunch of armours (banded mail, tegulated mail, splinted mail, etc) that are historically unattested!

A gorgon is a mythological monster or demon from ancient Greece with a visage that turned people to stone. Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa were the names of the three gorgons. Medusa, and in later stories all the gorgons, had serpents for hair. Medusa was the only mortal gorgon. Having 'medusas' and then unrelated 'gorgons' is like calling countries 'australias' and then saying that the word 'countries' means 'sports teams'.

Historically, alchemy has been more about enlightenment, spiritual refinement, and purity of the self, than it has been about mystical proto-chemistry.

Necromancy means getting information from the (spirits of the) dead, not animating dead bodies.

...And so on.

Category 2. No Thought Given to Consequences.

'Fantasy' doesn't mean 'anything can happen at any time without underlying rule or predictable reason'. That's a description of a dream sequence, or certain strains of postmodernism. Sometimes we get peeved by encountering medieval facades with no real thought given to the consequences of having magic and monsters.

Even something as seemingly essential as the towering stone castle is the product of social and political forces: castle building is a consequence of a fractured state that lacks strong central coordination, instead delegating power to local or regional leaders willing and able to use violence to maintain control. Those leaders build castles (i.e., fortified residences of local elites often used for administration including taxation) to (generally) shore up their vulnerabilities and (specifically) as a vital defence against their nearby peers, in a context where land is wealth and the central state isn't powerful enough to police them.

Castles exist in those conditions as long as there are the resources to make them, and as long as there aren't technologies that can trivially defeat them. Note that castles were replaced by star fortresses in the era of powerful artillery. Lots of common fantastic elements can defeat stone walls at a distance or under cover of stealth: flight or levitation, rock-to-mud or other transmutations, giants or other really big creatures, instantaneous travel, earthquakes, and powered-up versions of mundane siege attacks, like tunnelling, throwing big rocks, or inflicting plague or demoralisation. Such elements entail fewer castles - or none, if they are sufficiently available. Maybe star forts are the way to go in this particular fantasy setting. Or bunkers. Or enormous moats. Or maybe magic is the only defence that works.

Of course, if fantastic elements make it easier to build castles, that provides an impetus in the opposite direction. If good permanent masonry can be conjured by any town magician, then yes, castles might be everywhere despite being permeable to magic... but also, every town will be furnished with multiple curtain walls, aqueducts, tall stone buildings, stone roads, and so on.

In general, every fantastic element in a setting needs to be considered in terms of: how does this affect the overall milieu? If every other mage can send a magical message a hundred miles and every town has at least a couple of mages, what does that imply for a ruler's ability to receive information, wage war, and administer the state at a distance? Because it's sure not governed by the speed of a messenger on horseback any more.

Category 3. Assumptions Based on Modern Culture.

Writers all too often take for granted that some aspects of a free, capitalist society will just show up in a setting: a cash economy, an absence of individual obligations to people higher in the pecking order (or a lack of a pecking order), freedoms of speech and movement and so on, and a modern sense of morality where things like 'don't torture animals' and 'don't execute prisoners' are obvious rather than a weird joke.

Obviously some of these things are desirable to have in a setting just so that readers or players won't be icked out. And obviously if a game or novel requires its audience to pursue a comprehensive course of historical/sociological/economic study before they can engage with it, that game or novel is limiting itself in a pretty major way. But if a setting has these things, it should have a reason to have them. It's not actually that difficult to do - 'gods literally exist, they desire these things for a reason X, and they have worked to implement them by means Y' gets you most of the way there in one sentence. Our peeve is when the world is 'modern Western civilisation with the serial numbers written in Blackletter' and that's just ...how it is. The average powerless pre-industrial commoner can go where they want, choose where to work, says what they want to who they want, has money and spends it, doesn't live in fear of the powerful, and is a devout utilitarian ethicist. Without any of the necessary structures to enable that.

Category 4. Maladaptive Feedback Loops.

There's something that's happened since the dawn of TTRPGs. Game masters - or players - excise the parts of the rules they don't like or don't see the need for. The least popular rules get ignored, popular house-rules spring up and pass on, and in the worst case, poorly-laid-out rule books result in certain good ideas just never making it to the table. Popular voices spread their own gameplay changes through the hobby - first through magazines, then blogs, now social media - and widespread changes in gameplay result.

Later generations of designers create new editions of old games, or make their own new games, based on the way they remember playing or the way people seem to want to play. The feedback loop completes. Some innovations are for the better, but useful material is also lost.

And so you get big successful games about delving into dungeons with whole books oriented towards game masters which somehow forget to teach said game masters how to properly run a dungeon delve. Or sections on realm management which boil down to 'wing it', where bygone editions had exceptional rules for that baked in. Or wilderness survival rules so brief and generous that choosing the right starting character negates any possible wilderness survival gameplay.

Well, so what?

In our own work, we like to put together material that bears all these things in mind. We said 'peeves', but really, it's about forming a cohesive, interesting whole that won't turn off a reader who knows too much and doesn't expect too much out of a new reader/player who's coming from a different genre, style, or expectation.

The Obligatory "Pre-industrial Weapons and Armour in Games" Post

The Obligatory "Pre-industrial Weapons and Armour in Games" Post

This post is in two parts: first "The Principles", where I lay it out, and then "The Polemic", where I whinge about it. None of the content is controversial, but it IS relevant when considering questions like "why do the majority of fantasy and historical TTRPGs use great detail and complicated rules to get the fundamentals of combat completely wrong, when they could just get it all wrong with nice simple rules and thereby leave more room for impressive full-colour artwork? Or maybe they could even get it right?"

This has been percolating a while; I was motivated to actually write it down because Tod's Workshop recently posted his updated arrow vs armour videos.

Part 1: The Principles

How do historical weapons and armour work?

Hard objects are propelled by muscle power to cause trauma to bodily tissue. Force multipliers exist: delivering the same amount of force at a point increases trauma (especially to the more delicate internal organs) by improving penetration; delivering that force at an edge increases trauma by causing a cut. A weapon strike is more dangerous if the point or edge is sharper, or if the muscle delivering the power is stronger, or if the muscle delivers the power more efficiently, or if the weapon is heavier.

It should go without saying that if practically ANY bit of a person gets forcefully hit by a battlefield or arming weapon (that is, a weapon that is actually designed as a weapon, with a metal striking blade/point/face), that person is likely maimed or suffers a wound that kills them (whether after seconds, minutes, or hours). The body simply cannot stand up to the kinds of forces that pre-industrial weapons can very easily attain.

Armour mostly protects against weapon strikes in one or more of three particular ways:
1. Dampen - the armour reduces the force multiplier provided by the point/edge. Sophisticated armour, when struck directly, can mostly negate the weapon's ability to pierce or cut, so that the force behind the blow is all that matters.
2. Distribute - the armour distributes the weapon's force over a wider surface area and through a greater volume of material. It absorbs some of the weapon strike's force so that it causes less trauma.
3. Deflect - the armour provides a surface that is curved and hard to bite. This can cause a weapon to hit less squarely and therefore transmit less force.

Armour of course does not make a weapon strike less likely to hit the wearer. More enclosing armour includes face protection which restricts the wearer's vision and may restrict their head's range of motion; you are accordingly more likely to be hit by weapon strikes when wearing it. Combatants with visored helmets are known to have often left those visors up when in combat, trading protection for visibility and breathability.

Armour is part of a protective package which includes its wearer trying not to be hit by weapon strikes. There are any number of variations on what we might call defences: parry, dodge, sidestep, stepping away, counter, riposte, deflect; any of these can fail, or succeed, or be partially successful (reducing the potential for harm), and might leave the defender in a more or less advantageous position to follow up.

Without the ability to fight defensively, armour helps (especially against ranged and poorly-aimed attacks), but is certainly less effective. In particular, given a weapon, time, and access to an unconscious or otherwise non-resisting armoured target, it is trivial to harm the target by aiming for (necessary) gaps or removing parts of the armour. Both tactics are historically attested.

Armour has gaps because people have needs: they need to breathe, speak, listen, and move their joints. With skill and technological advancement, these gaps could be made quite small. They can't be removed, except perhaps with magic.

Armour historically came in myriad types and forms. If we wanted to impose a simple typology on effective battlefield armours, we might decide on four categories:
1. Textile, flexible armour made of layers of cloth.
2. Mail, flexible armour made of small joined metal rings.
3. Semi-rigid armour, made of many small rigid plates joined in various ways (brigandine, lamellar, etc).
4. Plate armour, made of larger rigid plates moulded to specific body parts, almost always metal, usually iron or steel.
All four kinds were at times worn over (greater or lesser amounts of) padding.

Competent warriors can strike quickly with a weapon: it's heavily contextual, but once per second is a reasonable baseline. In optimal situations (a helpless opponent, shallow strikes, thrusts rather than swings, a light weapon) they might be able to deliver upwards of three strikes per second. In poor situations (concurrently needing to defend, deep follow-through strikes, swings rather than thrusts, a heavy weapon) they might only deliver a strike every few seconds. Seriously, in general strikes can be made incredibly quickly, even against an opponent skillfully fighting back - I recommend looking up videos of HEMA fencing with any number of different weapons and see for yourself.

A weapon does not have a single "kind" of attack it can make. Different strikes can accomplish different things, risk different things, and are more or less useful in very specific situations. Someone skilled with a versatile weapon like a sword might distinguish between hundreds of different kinds of ways to use it to deliver a blow.

It is generally true that the closer the weapon's point of impact to the wielder's hand, the easier it is to aim. It is more or less impossible to fail an attack with a dagger because you missed, assuming that you can see and reach the target. Conversely, it is more or less impossible to hit even a stationary human-sized target at the longer ranges a war bow can reach. At long ranges, bows are for shooting at formations.

So what specifically happens when weapons and armour meet?

It depends on a huge number of factors. But in general, the armour dampens, distributes, and/or deflects some or all of the force as described above. A sapient attacker knows this, and therefore will typically attempt to strike where the opponent is unarmoured, or strike at points where the armour is thinner (limbs and especially joints). In heavily armoured combat, it was VERY common to resort to wrestling, to position the enemy such that you can remove a piece of their armour, or drive a small, narrow weapon like a dagger into a gap.

Again, there are a huge number of factors to consider. But we can give some important generalities. A bladed weapon can deliver various different kinds of "cut". For strikes where the edge does all the work (like a draw cut or push cut with a sword), any kind of metal armour can easily dampen the strike to the point that it has no effect whatsoever (and this would be true even for attackers with supernatural strength). Those kinds of strike can only harm the armoured opponent at places where they are not covered with armour. For kinds of cut where the weapon's weight does a lot of the work (like a downward chop from a polearm or axe), encountering armour will always lessen the blow, but much of the force is likely to be transmitted. Such a strike can cut through mail (or break bones through it), and has a chance of cutting through thinner or lower-quality metal plates (or cause bruising or concussion through it, damage the armour's ability to articulate properly, or other woes).

Historically, the tactics to use against plate armour were (a) to wrestle the wearer, (b) to penetrate it with gunpowder weapons (the arms race between plate and guns being a key driver for the very existence of sophisticated plate armour), or (c) to deliver heavy impacts with large amounts of force dealt by heavy weapons delivered by muscle power. Weapons specifically designed for blunt impact have an advantage here mostly because they have less risk of breaking (thickness, langets, relatively broad striking face, etc).

More speculatively, armour would have some protective qualities against attacks in the form of quick bursts of very hot, very cold, or very corrosive substances, by way of reducing the amount of the body exposed. It might not work or even be counterproductive for long exposures, but any insulation is going to be better than none against a few seconds of exposure: you can wave your hand through a candle flame, but it will hurt to hold it there for a few seconds unless you're wearing a glove, in which case you might well be fine until the glove catches fire. (Don't try this.)

Against electrical attacks, it may not be intuitively obvious, but if you are receiving an electrical shock, then wearing lots of metal armour like a full plate harness or mail hauberk might actually help by acting as a Faraday cage, especially if your armour extends to sabatons (plate boots) or chausses (mail leggings). Metal is a better electrical conductor than the human body. (REALLY don't try this. Also, if the attack is a literal "lightning bolt", then in addition to the shock you're receiving a superheated explosion, so armour may add metal shrapnel to the injury.)

So to sum up, the most fundamental elements of pre-industrial combat are
1. Weapons are used to deliver strikes very rapidly against an opponent who is trying to reciprocate and also trying to counteract your strikes;
2. Armour can save your life by making mortal wounds into minor ones or even completely preventing them (but it may make you easier to hit);
3. A competent fighter would know their armour's limitations (in terms of actual physical gaps and weak points, the way the armour has to compromise with mobility and perception, weaknesses to specific types of weapon and styles of strike, etc) and focus their defensive manoeuvring on compensating for those limitations;
4. There are some situations where a type of armour would make you near-invulnerable (e.g. wearing plate armour and attacked with an arming sword) and others where it would do nothing but slow you down (e.g. wearing mail and shot at with high-poundage crossbows);
5. It's possible your opponent will defend against your melee weapon strike, but it's very unlikely you will just miss; conversely, pre-industrial ranged weapons can shoot further than they can be accurately aimed at individual targets;
6. Any unarmoured part of your body being forcefully struck with an actual battlefield weapon would cause physical trauma that would immediately reduce your capacity to fight, and often kill you (whether immediately or eventually).

It's very interesting to me that so many historical or fantasy TTRPGs (accidentally or deliberately) get either most or all of these elements wrong.

Part 2: The Polemic

I'm not going to write in detail about the degree to which table-top role-playing games tend to exclude these six elements (I think a survey of the field is convincing in that regard), nor an analysis of whether their designers do so wittingly or unwittingly (I suspect it would mostly come down to inertia and precedent, and that if some different choices had been made in 1974, the state of play would be startlingly different).

But I do want to suggest that if you're not going to have armour work the way that armour actually works, and you're not going to have weapons work the way that weapons actually work, and you're not going to have bodily injury work the way that bodily injury actually works...

Then since those parts of your combat system don't correspond to anything in the real world, why not make it all very simple and quick to deal with at the table? Or more drastically, why have a mechanical combat system at all? Why shouldn't a fight and its possible outcomes be deeply abstracted, so that the referee can describe it however they wish and move on to a part of the game that players can actually make informed choices in, a part whose mechanics reflect how the players understand reality?

What really baffles me is layering lots of game complexity on top of mechanics which are fundamentally immersion-breaking.

In order to give an example, I will pick on 5e because it's the biggest target and violates 5 of those 6 fundamental elements I listed. In particular, consider:

• Six-second turns. One weapon strike per six seconds regardless of armament (a very slow rate), with small improvements for some characters which never come close to what's easily physically possible (even for these characters who are superhuman in other ways!). We know it's not a matter of "the rest of your turn is spent defending" because e.g. you don't get more attacks if you're attacking a paralysed (or unconscious, etc) creature while its cronies are kept busy elsewhere in the battle. We also know it's not a matter of "one attack equal multiple weapon strikes" because of rider effects which are meant to take place on every hit. (There's a related issue of preposterously fast crossbows which I won't get into.)
• Hit Points. Works well as a game mechanic, doesn't reflect anything about the reality of bodily injury. We know it's not just a measure of heroic luck (attacks barely grazing you) etc, because of various things like fall damage and rider effects like inflicting poison on hit. Most entities can suffer multiple weapon strikes before going from "perfectly combat-effective" to "dying". And "dying" actually means "roughly equal chances of waking up without a scratch on you tomorrow, and being dead in seconds. No middle ground", which obviously doesn't map onto anything from our reality, and has largely unexplored consequences for a 5e game world.
• Armo[u]r Class. In 5e, armour makes it more difficult to hit you. More charitably, you could interpret it as an extreme abstraction where armour either completely negates a blow (somehow including any rider effects like ``teleport any creature struck'' or ``delivers electrical shock on hit'') or does nothing. Note that any given armour works as well against a two-ton boulder as it does against a thrown branch, a magic dart, or a shark bite. Except when one of those things uses a save mechanic instead, in which case it does nothing.
• It's relatively easy for even an untrained archer to shoot at individual targets at the limits of a projectile weapon's range.

These design choices make it VERY DIFFICULT for a GM to adequately describe a fight. An attack that hits usually doesn't feel like it hits; "you're injured" doesn't really mean you're injured. If a player rolls maximum damage, taking off all but one of the foebeast's hit points, and you the GM describe how their character cleaved through the monster's arm and into their torso, then they're going to be upset if it starts using that arm. Any reasonable player will want to know if they can stand back and wait for it to bleed out. You'll find yourself rolling back your description or desperately trying to invent mechanics that 5e doesn't provide, despite its overarching focus on the tactical combat minigame. The GM is forced to describe all strikes before the killing blow as tiny glancing hits, or admit that all adversaries can fight on just fine with a "deep stab wound" or "crushed collarbone" or whatever.

...And even that would be fine if 5e didn't have variable rolled damage. Even players who know nothing at all about real pre-industrial weapons and armour are going to start thinking "why doesn't this match my expectations?" when their 23-damage rage-fuelled heavy magical bardiche attack is described as "a small cut" and the 2-damage sword slice which kills the beast "lops its head from its body".

So 5e is designed to have all these elements which don't match reasonable expectations of how reality should work. Why? Mostly "historical antecedent"; they all largely existed in the game since 1974... but back then, you could run a hundred-per-side combat in fifteen minutes, so that lack of verisimilitude paid off with the huge amount you could get done in a game. And having relatively few mechanics alongside that abstraction meant the referee had much more scope to invent details of the combat however they saw fit.

What changed? The answer is simple - that same layer of abstraction persisted, but a lot of stuff got built on top of it. Where before that implausible abstraction bought you a game that ran really fast and smoothly, now you have the same implausible abstraction but with dozens of combat-oriented class features and player options built on top of it, with the GM forced to find a way to describe them in a way that somehow makes sense. And it doesn't run fast or smoothly; you have to linger in the immersion-breaking details, because the increased rules burden means that "fifteen minute combat" is only possible with a handful of player characters against a tiny number of foes (and even then, only when the players are decisive, competent, and playing at low levels where some of their options are locked away).

And you end up with a game that's FUN, yes, of course it's fun, but it's a game where anyone actually paying attention at the table, or with even a smidgen of domain knowledge, surely comes away from it thinking some variation of "it's weird how this expensive equipment my character has doesn't do what you'd think" or "I wish we didn't have to do combats so that I could be better immersed in the game" or "so if I wasn't wearing my armour when I frozen in place, I guess that big ogre's sword swing... wouldn't have 'barely whistled over my head'?" or "it sure is weird how the GM said the battle took eighteen seconds but it took almost an hour to play and I only got to swing my axe three times, I guess that's just how tabletop gaming works".

Or "I wonder what we're doing wrong." 😞

I'd like to think that this mess of words could be of use to some game designer, so let's distil out a takeaway: Use some introspection in making design decisions. If it's fun to do tactical combat games, and it's fun to be immersed in a role-playing game, then maybe design your tactical-combat-heavy role-playing game in a way where it's possible to be immersed in the tactical combat. Make it so really basic practical understanding of reality like "these metal plates should protect me exceptionally well against swords; against a five-ton giant they are a liability" isn't a curse but a boon. And no, going full GURPS granularity to simulate every strike every fraction of a second doesn't have to be the only solution: all games use abstraction. You can use abstraction in a way that produces fun and makes sense and speeds up the game in the places where it should be sped up. You can! We believe in you.

- Ben M, Periapt Games